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>> on our discussion on efforts to expand the supreme court our first guest of the morning, brian the group demand justice and the cofounder and executive director. good morning to you. >> morning to you, great to be with you. >> can you describe your organization and what it does and also who financially backs it? >> sure, we were founded in 2018 in response to donald trump and mitch mcconnell's maneuverings to confirm more than 200 judges to the federal courts that we believe will move the country dramatically to the right and we support fair and balanced courts. we are urging the biden administration currently to nominate professionally diverse,

young judges that have backgrounds as public defenders and as civil rights lawyers andn to help restore balance to the courts. we are supported by a vast array of both foundations that fund our work on this private c13 seaside is on the other side when we do lobbying and on that side we have a lot of thousands of grass roots that contribute to us on a monthly basis. >> when it comes then to the topic of expanding the number of justices on the court where you and your organization's fall on that perspective? >> our group since 2018 has supported a range of structural reforms to the federal judiciary, including adding to the supreme court. we believe in a growing share of the public or a public poll show also believes that this up in court is broken and it's legitimate sees have been called into question and its trust with the public has been broken and that has happened for two reasons one in the last five

years we have seen republicans in the senate engage in a lot of maneuverings in order to shift the court to the right and assure themselves of the six-three super majority that now exists on the courts. most of your audience will remember what happened in 2016 after antonin scalia died and republic is refused to consider any nominee from barack obama and final year of his presidency and then also last year we had supreme court nominee confirmed closer to presidential election that has everio happened beforen our history so the republican's good jam through a conservative successor to ruth bader ginsburg. also the ruling of the supreme court has shown the body to be rather partisan one and one that is increasing that can't be trusted to call balls and strikes as john roberts famously said at his confirmation hearing about 15 years ago. you seen this court since 2006, rule 70% of the time in chamber commerce which is the main lobbying arm of big business in this country. he seen them consistently side

with the republican political interest when it comes to cases regarding elections and voting rights. everything from the shelby county decision in 2013 with the devoting rights act to division into allow states to continue to engage in gerrymandering and we had a lot of cases where the roberts court is consistently siding with interests in the republican that is making it harder for people to vote. the last five years you're starting to see public polling show that there's an erosion in the trust of people having for the supreme court and without trust in the legitimacy as a institution they can't be viewed as legitimate paid we think structural forms including seeds and well as a term limits and a binding quote of exit for the supreme court are all necessary. >> our guess is with us to talk about the issues of expanding the supreme court and if you want to call and give us your thoughts on it as wellll republicans (202)748-0000, demarest (202)748-8000 and independence 202748-8002 and

yuko wrote an op-ed with representative jones of new york on this issue and he is one of the sponsors of something called the judiciary act of 2021. it proposes adding four seats to the court and the court would consist of a chief justice in 12 associate justices and that is equal to the number of federal judicial circuits so what to think about this proposal? >> yeah, in the fall of 2020 when ruth bader ginsburg died democrats and ernest started talking aboutea this proposal to add seats to the supreme court and they said that a lot o' people said we don't want to have to pursue this path but if her publicans are going to obliterate, you know, the last remaining norms when it comes to confirmation processes around supreme court justices then this will be the only appropriate response. you even have republican and independent commentators, people like joe scarborough, former republican congressman and lawyers from the nixon and reagan administration coming out

last fall after ruth bader ginsburg died saying democrats would be wise to pursue this as a response if mitch mcconnell goes through with it. of course, they did and they jammed amy coney barrett threw over bipartisan objections, susan collins of maine voted with democrats to oppose her confirmation a days before the election and they went through itay and so now we have leadersn congress including ed markey on the senate side as well as congressman your congressman jones, new york on grossman jury another who happens to be the chairman of the house judiciary committee offer this proposal to add four seats to the supreme court and a lot of people don't realize it's not in the constitution that the number of justices on the courtsth and its up to congress to set that number. congers has change the number seven times in our nations history and it's firmly within congress' power in the most straightforwardly constitutional way to achieve balance and undo the sort of lopsided three-conservative majority that now exists. yes, i wrote that op-ed the other dayte with congressman jos

to draw attention to a new polling that came out that showed the proposal that hepo introduced to add four seats is supported by a plurality of the american voters byur six points more support adding seats then don't. >> since you mentioned the late justice ginsburg you probably have seen stories to the fact that she has said maybe expanding the court wasn't a good idea and even justice breyer saying so in the recent days so what to think about numbers of the court itself hesitancy with this idea? >> i've been asked about that a lot and whenever i am i say they are on the courts what to expect them to say. sitting justices on the court of course they will say that there is nothing legitimate about the institution and that their power shouldn't be called into question and it is sort of similar to different or it's not completely apples to apples but a lot of your viewers may have followed the recent controversy in georgia around the voting rights law there and in response to this voting rights measure

wrote a suppression measure that the republic and legislator passed and brian kemp the governor seconded and a lot of businesses have sort of taken positions against the law and major-league baseball even made the decision to pull the all-star game out of atlanta in response and you've seen in response to that or to those announcement by corporate america a lot of democratic politicians disagree with that law and we don't want the economy in georgia here to suffer as a people like stacy abrams and senator warnock and the democratic senators from georgia has said they don't support businesses pulling out of georgia because they live in georgia and so of course they have to say that but that is not to say that corporate america or other outside voices are wrong for making it stand against the voter suppression law in georgia. ruth bader ginsburg, steven breyer, their job to publicly try to keep confident up about the court as an institution but it's the job of thus on the outside that can have enough common sense to note that the court has become irreparably

politicized to make proposals like this one. >> the president has made announcements on this and talked about forming a commission to take a look at the issue and we heard both speaker pelosi and senate majority leader say they will hold off on making an effort to expand the court until they hear from the commission and is that a good move? >> the commission is something that, by its very existence, is a nod to the surge and interest and outrage amongst many members of the democratic party but even a lot of independent so i then commissioned in the fall of 2020 and now at the apex of attention on the death of justice ginsburg and republican decision to move forward with amy coney barrett and for him it was a rather big step because during the primary campaign there were a lot of candidates in the democratic primary that expressed openness to adding seats to the supreme court and term limits to the supreme court justices and joe biden was not one of them. for him to even say that he wanted a commission to look at this was a statement and a testimony to how much outrage

there was. it is now been about six months since he promised that commissionth and the composition of it, i think, those not inspire confidence in terms of how aggressive it will probably be. it's about 36 members on it including a lot of people that contributed to the political colorization of federal judiciary and a lot of members of the so-called federal society which is the right wing groups that kavanaugh and amy coney barrett belong to and it's hard for me to imagine that those members of the commission will be open-minded to reforms that were sort of mitigate this six-three conservative majority on the courts. the other feature that does nota inspire a terminus amount of confidence is the president literally said in his instructions to the commission when he set it up at that he doesn't want them to make formal recommendations tos. him but he just wants him to study the issue so that's what's observers

are saying it looks like a classical washington blue ribbon commission which is where ideas go to die but i think the attention that the commission will bring to the issue is to the good and we will certainly try to leverage that to bring more attention to this conversation but i doubt this commission itself and anything it issues will be significantly move the needle.: >> we have a call lined up for you. brian, demand justice, john is in california, republican line you were on with our guest. go ahead with your question or comment. >> caller: okay. we were talking about expanding the size of the supreme court and i think that, let's say i talked government at a community level college out heree for a number of years and if you look at three documents and one is the virginia plan that madison put together before the constitution and if you look at the federal journal of the federal convention which are the

minutes to the constitutional convention, something,on by the way, i did not know about through a masters program thatha that was available and then also the constitution and you will find that the court is able to advise on legislative matters and legislative powers the power to make the rules we live by and that is article one, section one that the court or that the congress has all legislative power on that. >> host: to the topic of expanding the court what would you like our guest to address? >> caller: the idea that the courts should not be doing what it is doing. it can advise in the congress has total power over making rules so they can make a rule that r we lived by or destroy us but the court can only advise and that is their relationship in article six. they can support but the president has a very unique position and he is the only one designated to defend and protec-

>> host: thanks britt anything to that? >> caller: i think, you know, one of the things the caller seems to be hitting on is that the court is disproportionally powerful compared to the other two branches i think nowadays and this is the problem that has been identified by a lot of scholars that have proposed other ideas to try to reduce the courts influence in addition to adding seats and outspoken professor at yale has floated the idea of casting a requirement that for this up in court to overturn acts of congress it should need to have achieve a super majority of six-three instead of five-four. bauer who is one of the cochairs of the president's commission unzipping court reform is also expressed openness to that idea. other proposals to and his jurisdiction and walling off certain areas of the law from supreme court review and all of

these proposals are being expressed because there is a deeply held view among a lot of court watchers that the courts influence has far surpassed with the founders ever intended and you have seen congressional hearings in the last month on the so-called shadow docket which refers to rulings of the court in the supreme court now routinely issues in the dark of night without any oral arguments for the cases and without even having to issue signed opinion so that we know how the justices individually voted on the rulings. that is become the normic of a t of high-stakes cases involving covert safety precautions that governors are implementing insurgent states as well as a lot of voting issues that came to the surface in the run-up to the 2020 election. there is a feeling out there that the court is sort of acting in an unaccountable manner which is in part revealing this push for reform. the last thing on that point is to some extent the court power relative to the other branches

being so looming so large right now is in part due to the failure of say the legislative branch to carry out its function. we have seen the courts power rise as congress has become gridlocked to the point of not being able to resolve a lot of the big questions of the day. d some people, including myself, think that's by design that one of the republic and party strategies and mitch mcconnell in particular has been to make congress dysfunctional to steer the courts to the right d and to achieve the outcomes that they wish for their political agenda through the court while making the legislative basically neutralized. >> from a democrat line, lance, fort lauderdale, florida. >> caller: good morning, pedro. i would like to challenge you on your basic premise that the idea that the court is out of balance as if the court the composed of democrats and are public and hearings and the courts are composed of judges and they leave their personal opinions at the gate when they put on the

robe. i challenge you, mr. fallon, to tell me what the democratic law and what is the republican law and i'm a paralegal and worked with the deputies from new york and california and florida and i have yet to find one that lets the personal opinions implement the law and that is the law and if the law says you pay a 25 $for a speeding ticket that's not a republican law but a democratic law but the law and if you don't like the law you can change it and that is what the legislator is for. what you are doing is setting up a situation and you talk about credibility on the court. so they can put four more onto so-called balance it and then in four years we have a republican president and he decides well be need for more and thende democrt after that decides we need for more and this goes on and on into the night. ruth bader ginsburg was against it and every justice is against it. any judge i've ever argued before or known personally and my uncle is a judge and it's

about republicans and never let that influence opinion and you don't know many judges and you want to influence what goes on on the courts. it shows that you say you want to balance it. >> host: okay, you made your point and will let our guest respond. >> guest: i think the caller raise the example of if you get $25 for a parking ticket that's pretty black and agree that some statutes in some matters of statutory interpretation are pretty clear-cut but a lot of them aren't, especially when it comes to constitutional interpretation. questions around the due process clause in the 14th amendment and these are questions that people of good faith on both sides the political spectrum have, you know, raging debates about that have lasted for decades and so the matter of constitutional interpretation is somewhat politicized and you don't havee to take my word for it but the conservative movement

that has achieve this significant complement of happiness six-three majority in the court right now really is the capstone of an intentional 50 year process that the political right launched in order to swing the courts to the right. republicans started the federalist society and got fed up with nominees of republican presidents getting onto the cord and surprising them with how they rule on the cases. some of the most liberal justices of the last 50 or 60 years were appointed by republican presidents. john paul stevens, for instance. that bothered republicans and we will not allow this to happen anymore but if we get republicans elected and if we control the senate and can confirm people of our choosing we want to make sure that we know they will be with us on our tscore issues like gun rights ad abortion rights and worker issues with their employers. they do not want datass which ws george hw bush is picked and

that surprise conservatives by ending up being a reliable vote with the liberal faction on the courts.pr they put in this process that imposed a bunch of litmus tests and it reached this apex in 2016 when donald trump literally said i'm only going to pick from the list of these individuals and i'm going to make sure that anybody who i pick is going to be committed to things like overturning roe v wade and i want them to know communally they will roll to overturn the affordable care act and he campaigned on that openly and that was cheered and celebrated and viewed as an act of political genius by many political commentators because he waser no longer putting any guile to it but being open about his intentions and so, you know i don't begrudge the republicans that mitch mcconnell and donald trump have so openly stated their ambitions here but d i jut think we ought to do something tons respond to it we have a si, three conservative majority on

this court even though democratic candidates for president have garnered more votes in the last four presidential elections in seven out of the last eight so that seems out of whack and i think it will be politically untenable. republicans will have a problem pretty soon with the so-called dog that catches the bus. they now have the ultimate that they wanted for years and they have a conservative corporation and now it will start issuing rulings on all the issues that motivated republicans to want to take over the court and when it does that those rulings will be highly unpopular with the emergent people in the spring or just accepted a case is weak that we hear next termt that it could have the potential to dramatically expand gun rights in this country and overturning restrictions on concealed carriesov permits and states lie new york that have very crowdeda population centers and don't want to allow people to pack heat and bring it into time school or bring into guns into times square t and increase a potential for mass shooting event. the supreme court may be employed to strike out the

proposal lecture which will not be greeted well by program public that has grown weary of mass shooting after mass shooting. >> host: brian fallon of our group demand justice. lakeland, minnesota, independent line. >> caller: good morning, c-span great good morning, america. this is really a fun topic and congratulations on your new paycheck. i don't like the word demand. it sounds so immature. when you talk about balancing the court you don't balance a court by putting four new ones on so that it unbalances the otherr way in which you are trying to swing it towards your expectation. i will just say this, one of the proudest things in happy's things for me as somebody who believes in the courts and not politicizing the court is that donald trump got a hat trick. we are from the state of hockey here in hetrick's are good, my

friends. i love it. >> host: mr. fallon, go ahead. >> guest: i don't know where to go with that one. i think that the growing popularity for this proposal to add to the court reflects the mood in this country that is shifting and 20200 is the first election in the long time were the democratic candidate for president, joe biden, won the majority of voters and said the supreme court was the number one issue for that and that was the reverse of 2016 were hillary clinton lost those voters to donald trump. but the reverse was true in exit polls this year. as i mention before you were seeing a surge in support for proposals like the one that congress introduced this month and i think that's only going to increase in the months and years to come as more rulings come down from the supreme court that sort of show why republicans fought so hard to achieve this majority in the first place. the one that i should respond to

that the caller made is that we don't balance the court by adding four seats to tilted the other way. i would as the caller what if the proposal was modified and what if it was amended to say that we will add to seats but we will only add to now while joe biden is the president and leave the next two to be decided by the winner of the next presidential contest or what if we passed it in carbonation with a supreme court term limit proposal which my group also supports and would actually set a limit so that each president in any four-year given window can only appoint to justices and every justice hass to step down after 18 years which would regularize the process and would illuminate the ability for justices to sort of game the system by their time is strategically based on the president being empowered from the same party as now. these are proposals that my group supports and i think are perfectly fair and would restore balance and the number 13 though

has resonance and historical precedents. in every andncnc due to acts of congressss and every previous instance where congress has added seats to the court it's done so to bring it into alignment with the number of circuit courts which is the level of courts that are just below the supreme court and the number of seats in the supreme court are historically matched the number of circuits and that's because every justice on the supreme court has a sort of jurisdiction that it is in charge of to hearrg last-minute appeals that emanate from that jurisdiction. you frequently hear about the death penalty cases and they go to this report on appeal and it's a midnight decision from the supreme court about whether to stay the execution or not and the judges that issue those opinions or ones that match up geographically with certain federal circuitsir that they are in charge of but because there's nines before justicesne and 13 circuits certain justices have multiple circuits that they are in13 charge of and that is becae

we never had the size of the supreme court beem adjusted to match the current level of federal circuitch courts in this country which is 13. >> one was last time an adjustment was made on the court? >> guest: after the civil war. the court size changed three times in on the radical republican, stevens and the public and party that supported abolition of slavery and wanted the reconstruction to have real teeth to it and they added a justice because the court was going to president abraham lincoln's prosecution of the civil war then when lincoln died the radical republicans in congress did not trust president johnson to succeed him to oversee and implement reconstruction in the manner that theye thought was necessary to heal the country and so they prevented him h from filling the seats and reducing the court size. then they re- upped the size and when grant became president and

so the idea that the court has always been immune from partisan back-and-forth just belies the history and it reminds me of the fact of how people act like they would be horrified at the senate got rid of the filibuster and they don't realize that the filibuster is not in the minds of the founding fathers when they set up the contours of the united states senate and the filibuster did not exist until 1917 and so getting rid of it would not go against the division of the founders likewise it and if we change the size of the upstream court it would be very much befitting our history, not running counter to our history at all. >> host: here is diane from ann arbor, michigan, democrat line. >> caller: yes, hello, good morning. i feel the supreme court has become allegedly the body, especially senseci the last president trump with so many times just throw things to the supreme court to decide on and circumvent and get around the tlegislative process and also n

2010 chief justice roberts then voted for citizens united and i think from that point on it was just a game over, no more democracy but money as we know it. it is money, money, money. who has the most money and as far as justice barrett, i mean, you would not believe the money that was spent to get her in office by lobbying groups. it is not it takes the shine off the supreme court when i'm not questioning anyone's integrity but as a body i think they have lost a lot of trust in the american people that would how they are eroding. >> i will let the guest address what you brought up. thank you for the call.

>> guest: the caller raises a number of points which will not surprise you that i agree with to take them to take a couple of them at a time. the court is acting like a legislator and for years we've heard conservatives derive judicial activist judges and people that legislate from the bench and that is what this six-three conservative majority is doing right now. just in the last ten days or so we had a ruling come out from the supreme court that inspires some very fiery descends from justst a sotomayor and the other liberal justices because they basically removed the ability for juvenile defendants that have sentenced to life in prison ever tore have their sentences reduced. there've been to rulings from the supreme courtce since 2012 that have set a precedent that counted as cruel and unusual punishment too automatically sentence juvenilell defendants o lifey in prison without the possibility of reducing the sentence if they can show that they have been reformed and in

the ruling that came out last week that bret cannot wrote the majority opinion onma the basically said that no matter if somebody has the ability to be reformed and can demonstrate that it is okay for judges to impose mandatory life sentences with no possibility of shortening them. thatsh overturned not one but to presidents is that the court has set when anthony kennedy was still on the court since 2012. that's been our pattern with this conservative majority on the court in terms of overturning precedents that was a majorms force arbitration case in the last three years that overturned a 40 year precedent of the court and clarence thomas, one of the leading conservatives on the court has openly said he thanks that the notion of -- which is the fancy term to describe the difference the supreme court justices are supposed to give two long-standing rulings of the court issuesse g in the past the thanks it's bunk and that that's the president should not be controlling and the court should feel free to overturn rulings

that it disagrees with. that's a rather radical notion that deviates from the institution of the supreme court as we know it and i do think that legitimate the fear that the caller raises that the court is acting like a super legislator. last point i will make it she referenced the amount of money spent on amy cody baratz confirmation paired we spent a lot of money opposing her but there were other groups is but money in support of her and one of them was the koch brothers group americans for prosperity. they happen to have a court case in front of the supreme court justices just this week and they are challenging a california law that requires americans for prosperity and other groups like it to dispose its donors to the state attorney general. there is a lot of calls including from senator whitehouse from rhode islandan r amy coney barrett to recuse herself from the case because she was the beneficiary of so much outside of spending by the americans for prosperity and it stands to reason their release would be the appearance that she

could not be neutral in deciding this case about a group that had supported her to the tune of millions of dollars and she declined to step down and recuse yourself from the i think that fuels a lot of the concern about the legitimacy of the court and the lack of code of ethics that applies to the supreme fort justices. >> host: brian fallon is a cofounder and executive director of the group demand justice and the website is demand justice .org. if you want to see more about the work particularly on this issue, mr. fallon, thank you for your time on this issue. >> guest: thank you for having me and thank you to the callers. >> host: we continue on our discussion taking a look at efforts tota expand the supreme court with mike davis, founder and president of the article three project and also serves as a former chief counsel for nominations and senate judiciary committee of 2017-2019. richard davis, good morning. >> guest: good morning, the giver having a. >> host: can we talk about your group activities and how you are funded. >> guest: yeah, i run the article three project and we fight for a